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The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1931
Born: February 18
Died: 2019
Died: August 5
Audiobook Narrator
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Lorain
Ohio
Chloe Ardelia Wofford
Chloe Anthony Wofford-Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford
Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison
Recognized
Presence
Evil
Firsts
First
Something
Triumphed
Dealt
Survived

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You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.
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I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
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All important things are hard.
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The screams of a hurt woman were indistinguishable from everyday traffic.
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence it is violence does more than represent the limits of knowledge it limits knowledge.
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Political doesn't necessarily mean you have an agenda.
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What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
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Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
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Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.
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Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.
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Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.
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I sang O Holy Night in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.
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Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now _that_ was freedom.
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they ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four locked trees which promised cooling they flung themselves into the shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly
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Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
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